Force Spike Discussion

1 month ago

+1 from me :-)

So I was play testing the deck to try and find some ways of improving it, and here is what I found:

The deck is not consistent enough. I think that you need more ways of getting to your combo faster. The transmute cards are find, but you are mono blue; there are a TON of card draw spells that you have access to! Serum Visions is very good; and cards like Anticipate and Divination are also fine.

The deck does not protect itself super well. Removal spells are not super good in blue, but counterspells are aplenty. Mana Leak, Dispel, Negate, Force Spike, and Censor are all good ways of hindering your opponents plan.

In order to really take advantage of your infinite mana, you need some kind of infinite damage card, whether you like it or not. Because your combo produces mana of every color, you can run cards like Blaze can be run without even having to use red mana. Using an infinite mana combo will greatly increase your chances of winning(I am confident in this). If you feel like spending a bit extra cash, Walking Ballista is the best infinite mana sink in the format.

2 months ago

The mono blue one is a 4/4 flying, hexproof Force Spike that exiles spells - by far the best of the bunch. Also, the flying hexproof one-sided Heartbeat of Spring with extra scrying attached is quite good - if you untap with it, you will generally win.

Overall, these are not what I would call good cards, but dragons with keywords and not much else. A couple that I mentioned stand out, but otherwise nothing really inspiring me here to want to play with these.

Focus on designs that have not been explored to generate interest. I just thought of a 4 mana 7/7 flying, trample dragon that deals 6 damage to itself when it attacks. Powerful, but risky to use. It can be a Red/White one and also have XX: Prevent X damage that would be dealt to target creature or player. This is an example something that has not really been explored and that is interesting to see, from a design standpoint

3 months ago

3 months ago

Cards like Force Spike are typically not that good in commander. Especially with your commander, you may ad well run Miscalculation which will do more work.

You need more ramp. Like, early game ramp. Sol Ring is a must, but Fellwar Stone, Thought Vessel etc. are all good. You want to get a bit of ramp advantage in the first turn or two and then for turn 3 onwards you want to start countering stuff.

As for the number of counterspells, this is somewhat inversely proportional to how fast you can deploy you win condition. Also remember, you don't need to counter every spell. Target prioritisation is super important when it comes to playing control decks. Sometimes you're better off letting the big stompy thing resolve because you know it won't be pointed at you for a few turns. So to answer your question about how many conterspells, it varies. But I've found that with decent card advantage, ~13 works well (the full removal suite is somewhere around the 20 card mark).

3 months ago

It's worth a test but I doubt it. Being able to cycle away a dead conditional counter in the late game is good but the Force Spike effect is not just slightly worse than Mana Leak, it's way worse. Censor becomes dead as a counterspell so quickly, it's infinitely easier for the opponent to play around - particularly in Modern where a lot of powerful cards are very cheap to cast (Death's Shadow, Tarmogoyf, Lightning Bolt, Path to Exile etc.) - and in a deck like Delver where you're trying to pressure them enough that they don't have time to play around your conditional spells Leak plays into that strategy much better than Censor. Basically, they're as good as each other in the early game when the opponent is curving out and Censor is much better in the late game when both players have lots of extra mana to play with but Mana Leak is significantly better in the mid game when your opponent has a little bit of extra mana to use, you actively need to be disrupting what they're doing and when cycling a card for is actually kind of inefficient thing for the Delver deck to be doing with its mana.

4 months ago

Just saying, the link in your description doesn't work. I'm not sure if you want more counterspells, but here are a few that I like: Force Spike, Mana Leak and Spell Pierce. Cryptic Command is also a very powerful model spell, if you have it.

4 months ago

Nicely done with the trades! But yeah man, delay is great. At it's best you've "suspended" a hard counter that was trying to respond to something of yours. So once that final time counter removes on their upkeep, it's forced to cast and fizzle.

At its "worst" you've timewalked their general, or menacing creature for a few turns. The downside here is they gain haste.

Other than that, Countersquall isn't necessarily budget, but it's fairly effective in storm decks. The added life drain is cute. Dromar's Charm is VERY resource restrictive. But they're all within the colours of Breya. Force Spike is White Mana Tithe. Absorb is another hard counter that is very resource dependent - less than Dromar, and there's the cute life gain that's usually inconsequential. Memory Lapse is another timewalk that stalls your opponent. And if you're okay with 4 mana counters, Rewind is technically free.

Lastly, I think your land count is very low. In DC, tempo decks generally do not want to miss land drop + threat in the first 4 turns, which means they usually play 39-40 lands and no ramp before 0 mana.

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